Weekend Reading on Women's Representation February 23, 2018

By Cynthia Richie Terrell
on February 23, 2018

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My dear friends,

As I mentioned last week, RelfectUS - the new coalition of non-partisan organizations that are joining together to work for gender parity - is going live on March 6th! Please join us in person if you can -use this link to RSVPor email me directly with any questions!

I am also excited to announce that, thanks to the incredible work of Toni Gingerelli, RepresentWomen'sGender Parity Index Reportis now live! We already have gotten some fun coverage includingthis storyinRefinery29that links toSheShouldRun's terrific campaign to find 250,000 women to run for office by 2030:

There’s no easy way around it: Women are vastly underrepresented in elected and appointed political positions. According to research fromRepresentWomen, a nonpartisan initiative committed to achieving gender parity in office, the U.S. has fewer women in legislative positions than in 98 other countries in the world.

Things aren’t much better on the domestic front, either. According to the group’s2018 Gender Parity Index Report, women have progressed less than 40% down the road to equalrepresentation, a figure that’s slowed in recent years. (And this is nearly a century after women fought for — and won — the right to vote.) In short: There’s still a lot of work to be done before women are equally represented in government. But today, one beauty brand has announced an initiative to help bridge that gap.

As part of its just-launched#MoreThanLipscampaign, Soap & Glory has pledged to donate $5 for every social media post using the hashtag to national nonprofitShe Should Run, which aims to help 250,000 women run for office by the year 2030.

The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace published aterrific paperthis week that outlines the case for rules and systems reforms to advancewomen'srepresentation. While I encourage everyone to read the full paper to understand the recruitment targets and voting system reforms for which RepresentWomen is advocating I will post the summary here:

The United States has fallen behind most established democracies with respect to women’srepresentationin politics. Women remain underrepresented at the federal, state, and local levels. The current uptick in women running for office, while encouraging, is unlikely to close this gender gap. To accelerate the pace of progress, U.S. reformers could learn from European experiences and push for measures that tackle broader institutional barriers to equal politicalrepresentation.

A Transatlantic Perspective

In the United States, women generally win elections at the same rate as men—but they are less likely to run for office. The majoritarian electoral system, a strong incumbency advantage, gender-specific fundraising hurdles, and weaknesses in party recruitment reinforce this imbalance.

In contrast, in many European democracies, proportionalrepresentationrules, party-driven candidate selection, and public election financing have provided a more conducive institutional context for women’s advancement. Several European parliaments have also taken first steps to take stock of and improve internal measures of gender equality.

In addition, European gender equality advocates have successfully lobbied for party-level gender quotas and targets to ensure the systematic recruitment of female candidates. After initial pushback, parties accepted these measures largely due to high levels of internal and external pressure as well as strategic electoral calculations.

Steps to Ensure Equal Access to Political Office in the United States

Expand ranked-choice voting in multimember districts—beginning at the municipal and state levels—to push party officials to recruit a more diverse slate of candidates and weaken the incentives for negative campaigning.

Institute mandatory or voluntaryrecruitment targets for political partiesand well-resourced party mechanismsto identify, recruit, and support women candidates—particularly at the primary stage and in open-seat races. This step would signal high-level commitment to gender parity and ensure the continuous recruitment of qualified female candidates.

Establish gender parity targets for political action committeesand provide fundraising supportto female candidates in primary campaigns to help overcome current inequities in candidate financing, particularly on the Republican side. In the longer run, shifting to public financing at the local level may also benefit women candidates and candidates of color.

Collect systematic dataon gender equality and women’s experiencesto identify current barriers to women’s advancement in Congress, state legislatures, and executive branches of government.

Advocate for internal gender equality plansthat set out specific commitments to make legislatures and other branches of government more gender-sensitive—for example, by improving sexual harassment accountability procedures and prioritizing gender parity in leadership posts and committee assignments.

And as a reminder, it's not to late to vote like the Oscar voters do using ourRankIt App- read more about the Oscar nominations use of ranked choice voting inthis pieceby my husband Rob Richie.

​Onward toward parity!

Cynthia

P.S. Please check to see where your state ranks on RepresentWomen's Gender Parity Index and share the info on your social media platforms - using the hashtags #ParityIndex #RepresentWomen #RepresentationMatters - thank you!